Chris has introduced me to Delicious Library. He had mentioned it before, and it seemed kinda neat, but I forgot about it.

Now that I’ve tried it, I can only say WOW.

The concept is easy – it’s a library inventory system.

The usage is easy – I point my iSight (or other digital camera) at the bar code on the book, and it appears in my inventory.

I have a rather large collection of books, but I have only the vaguest idea of what books I have. I’ve attempted, on a number of occasions, to put these books into some kind of database or card catalog, but it has always been way too overwhelming. It seems that with this, I can enter a shelf or two in an evening, and in just a few weeks have my entire collection inventoried. It also gives a way to handle lending out stuff from your library and keeping track of who has what.

So, I know that this sounds like a sales pitch, but I had to share this discovery. Finding software that does something this well, and is this easy to use, is a fairly uncommon thing.